Q.E.D.

This blog asserted that the Presiding Bishop's conduct with respect to octogenarian Bishop Edward H. MacBurney was reprehensible and indefensible, sending him as she did an inhibition knowing his son was very soon to die, and after having been asked to forestall that action until his family crisis had passed. I was quickly assailed for having made a "scurrilous" allegation against the Presiding Bishop by saying what she did was deliberately cruel.

So I challenged anyone to offer a plausible explanation other than intentional cruelty for why she would have done what she did. And to date no one has. No one has said she didn't know the bishop's son was at death's door, because the evidence is that she did know. And none of the Presiding Bishop's followers have been able to explain why, given that knowledge, what she did was not un-Christian, was not lacking charity, and was not entirely avoidable.

That, of course, is not wholly a bad thing: it makes the point that what the Presiding Bishop did was so beneath contempt that even her most ardent disciples do not care to come to her defense in any substantive fashion. It suggests that some of them have a conscience and sense of morality that she wholly lacked in this situation--or at least have some cognitive dissonance. For them to say what she did was good or even acceptable would be to say something quite terrible about their own humanity and their own Christian ethics, and that they cannot do. That is itself, of course, silent condemnation of the Presiding Bishop's actions. Q.E.D.

But it also suggests that they are rank hypocrites, especially if they are the decent human beings or even Christians that most presumably wish to be. That's because they do not condemn what they know was very, very wrong. It suggests that even knowing this they are willing to subordinate to their political aims what is right and honorable and decent and Christian--much in the same way they stay silent when they know the rights of fellow Episcopalians under the canons are being transparently trampled upon and ignored. They destroy their very souls in order to get what they think they want. (And what, then, will they truly have gained when they do get what they want?)

At some level they recognize this hypocrisy, and cannot face it. So when called out, all some can do is throw up invective, resorting to accusations, for example, that the issue is all about being jealous because the Presiding Bishop acts without male sexual organs, or because we orthodox Anglicans are akin to male sexual organs. (A bit odd that recurring fixation.) Or they suggest, incorrectly, that perhaps the Presiding Bishop had no discretion under the canons, and was forced to do what she did. This of course shows that in their heart-of-hearts they hope she had no choice--because they know that what she did otherwise would have been quite horrible. Others fall back on an equivalency argument, that somehow a violation of the canons excuses a violation of the norms of civilized behavior. They don't think this one through very well, since the primary violator of the canons has been the Presiding Bishop herself, and surely they would not defend such cruelty against her if she had just lost her child (or if such cruelty was directed against themselves, for that matter). If this equivalency is admitted, what would not be allowed to do to an accused canon-breaker? And asserting an equivalency is still an effort to avoid facing the character of her conduct on its own terms.

What leaves the Presiding Bishop so exposed here are the canons themselves, for they make plain that what she did was entirely discretionary--both the inhibition itself, and its timing. The very canon she cites (Title IV, Canon 1, Section 6) says she may issue the temporary inhibition--classic legal language of discretion. There are no time dictates, and the action is one entirely tethered to circumstance. The next section (Section 7) then warns and mandates that such an inhibition "shall be an extraordinary remedy, to be used sparingly and limited to preventing immediate and irreparable harm to individuals or to the good order of the Church." [Emphasis added.]

Here is the reason there has been no defense made for the Presiding Bishop based on the canons, for it is her beloved canons that indict her, and highlight the totally volitional nature of her choice to inhibit Bishop MacBurney at the very moment his son was about to expire. Moreover, for her to satisfy the requirement of Section 7, she has to conclude that there is "immediate and irreparable harm to individuals or to the good order of the church." [Emphasis added.] Of course the bishop's great sin--confirming young people into the Anglican faith--was already done, so that was not an ongoing or immediate harm. (We'll leave aside the very open question of whether his confirmations rise to the level of the canon's requirement for inhibition.) So she would have to argue that unless she inhibited him at that very moment of family crisis and grief, Bishop MacBurney was likely to leave his son's bedside or casket and immediately go engage in some unauthorized episcopal acts. Even Katharine Jefforts Schori cannot say that with straight face.

So we are left with what this blog suggested initially: that the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church acted with deliberate and calculated cruelty against an elderly, grieving retired bishop. For all of Frank Griswold's heterodoxy, for all of his dissembling, to my knowledge no one ever could make the case that he was deliberately cruel. His successor has made that case about herself in spades with this indefensible action.

That is not something any of us as Episcopalians would want to believe, no matter what our views of the current crisis. We don't want to believe it because, if true, it tells us something quite awful about the ethics of those charged to shepherd us, and the depth of moral decay at the very highest levels of an institution that is supposed to be the Body of Christ. We can all hope that this conclusion is the wrong one, that in fact she did not know about the bishop's family crisis, or that she did not intend the inhibition to be delivered to him until long after his grief was abating, or that the entire inhibition was never meant to happen, given the strictures of the canons. We can all hope to hear that she has asked forgiveness of Bishop MacBurney for what she did. We can all hope that this blog will have reason to say mea culpa and say that the evidence shows the Presiding Bishop was in no way cruel to Bishop MacBurney and his grieving family.

We can also all hope that this is a terrible dream about a once-fine institution now corrupted and perverted in the very core of its being, and that soon we will awake and discover it never happened.